Josiah Ober is the Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. He is also the author of a new book from Princeton University Press, “The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece,” which seeks to uncover the reasons Classical Greece was so extraordinary, creating ideas and ways of doing things that still influence our world today. I interviewed him about his book over e-mail.
HF: Historians used to think about the classical Greek world of city-states as relatively impoverished. In fact, it seems to have supported a far higher standard of living than the empires around it. Why were the city-states of Greece more prosperous than their competitors?
JO: The Greeks tended to describe themselves as “poor” in contrast to the opulent lives of ruling elites in neighboring kingdoms – Lydia, Egypt, and especially Persia. But even taking slaves into account, it appears the average Greek lived very well – consuming several times the minimum needed to survive, at roughly twice the level of consumption that appears to be typical of premodern societies.
Interestingly, there is no evidence to suggest that Greece did unusually well either before or after the city-state era. This suggests that the primary driver of ancient Greek prosperity can be sought in political institutions (and informal norms of behavior) centered around citizenship. These included relatively fair laws, and open access to institutions for citizens (and, in some cases, certain non-citizens), which protected the bodies, property and dignity of individual Greeks from the depredations of powerful private individuals. These conditions gave people more reason to invest in human capital, to specialize in certain kinds of production, and to identify and develop comparative advantages in production and distribution of goods.
HF: Unlike Persia, which was ruled by a Great King and satraps (sub-rulers) who were at least nominally responsible to him, the Greek world was a decentralized ecology of many different independent cities, some large and some small, some democratic, and some ruled by narrow self-perpetuating elites. How did this decentralized ecology encourage innovation, and spread it from city to city?
JO: There were many differences of climate and natural resources (such as metals and timbers) across the Mediterranean world of the Greeks. It was a world where relatively small states competed intensely, but shared an “umbrella culture” of common language, religion, and other cultural features.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.